🏨 Choice Hotels: Reviews Drive AI Visibility

Missing bookings because the right guests can’t find you online? Hotel Azul Oaxaca used SiteMinder to expand visibility, simplify distribution, and turn demand into revenue.

They needed help solving a few problems:

SiteMinder helps hotels like Hotel Azul Oaxaca solve these problems by centralizing distribution, expanding visibility through metasearch, and giving teams the insights they need to make smarter commercial decisions.

Hotel Azul Oaxaca used SiteMinder to grow bookings, strengthen its online presence, and reach new demand from corporate and airline travel — without adding more work for the team.

👉 Learn how SiteMinder helps boutique hotels grow revenue online

Hopper will pay $35 million to settle FTC allegations that it pre-selected optional Tip and VIP Support fees, placed them below the fold, and sold Price Freeze without disclosing that the rate hold carries a cap and expires when inventory sells out. Hopper says it removed the practices in mid-2023, before the FTC opened its file, and paid $35 million regardless, so discontinuing a dark pattern leaves the prior years exposed. Any hotel booking flow with a pre-checked insurance box, a resort fee revealed at checkout, or an add-on the guest has to scroll to find now faces a documented enforcement template and a five-year lookback.

🎯 Why it matters: Hopper's fees were disclosed. They appeared on screen, and users could uncheck them. The FTC's case rested on placement and default state: charges sat below the fold and arrived pre-selected. That produced a $35 million settlement. The enforceable standard is whether total cost is clear before the guest completes the transaction, and a scroll requirement fails it.

🔑 Key takeaway: The FTC built a $35 million case from practices Hopper had already stopped three years earlier, against a defendant who still publicly maintains the claims had no merit. Fixing the booking flow today stops the meter. It does not clear the liability from how the flow ran in 2022. Read More →

Doug Lange, VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels, says AI search tools are pulling reviews, sentiment and service quality into the recommendation layer, which forces brands to be good at the specific things they want to show up for. Guests are now asking context-rich questions about walkability to a venue, room noise and parking, and models answer those questions from guest feedback rather than from brand messaging. Properties with weak operational sentiment will be filtered out before a marketing dollar has a chance to reach the traveler.

🎯 Why it matters: Guest reviews have become training data for the tools that decide which hotels get recommended. Lange's framing is that AI forces you to get good at the spaces you want to be found in. A property with repeated complaints about room noise will lose the "quiet rooms near the venue" query permanently, regardless of ad spend, because the model reads the lived experience rather than the brand promise. (Want to level up your review game? Check out the 2026 AI Guest Review Software Buyers Guide).

🔑 Key takeaway: AI search reads guest reviews, so operational quality now determines discovery - not gimmicky SEO/GEO tactics. Queries are not the same as keywords and will only improve in smelling BS over time. Travelers ask which property has quiet rooms and walkable venue access, and models answer from sentiment data. Marketing can no longer cover for a weak property. Our review corpus is the input to a ranking system we do not control, and we have never managed it as a distribution asset. Read More →

A Ramp and Revelio Labs study of 21,559 firms, built from observed AI vendor payments matched to monthly workforce records, puts accommodation and food services at an 11.5% paid-AI adoption rate, ahead of only arts and entertainment, while Information sits at 53.7% and finance at 43.6%. The same data undercuts the headline that AI is eliminating jobs: firms in the top tercile of AI spend per employee grew headcount 10.2% and entry-level headcount 12.0% over two years, and light spenders showed no change at all. Hotels sat out the first software cycle and watched Expedia, Booking, and Airbnb build the distribution and product layers on top of them, and the adoption gap in this paper is the same gap, one technology later.

🎯 Why it matters: Two years of headlines said AI adoption means job cuts. The best firm-level evidence available says the opposite, at least so far. Companies that spent heavily, $33.67 per employee per month versus $2.78 for the dabblers, grew total headcount 10.2%, sales headcount 10.3%, customer service 6.3%, and entry-level roles 12.0%. Nothing accrued to the light spenders. The gains only showed up six to twelve months after adoption, once tools were integrated into workflows. Spending is what separates the two groups, and hospitality is on the wrong side of it.

🔑 Key takeaway: Hotels have run this play before. Underinvestment in booking technology through the 2000s handed distribution to the OTAs and left the industry paying commissions on inventory it owns, and a decade of deferred product investment left an opening wide enough for Airbnb. The Ramp data shows hotels adopting AI at less than a quarter of the rate of the sectors building it. Capability compounds and takes a year to show up, so a competitor with an eighteen-month head start is not eighteen months ahead. Whoever ends up owning AI-mediated travel discovery is spending on it right now, and it is not the hotels. Read More →

✅ Canary Technologies: Powerful but simple AI powered digital guest journey platform.

✅ Sojern: Pay-for-performance hotel ads that drive direct bookings.

✅ FLYR Hospitality: Better data analysis for more profitable decision-making.

✅ IDeaS: Forecast demand accurately to increase occupancy and room profitability.

✅ Tripleseat: Manage hotel group bookings, catering and event sales with AI.

✅ ROH: Automate sales and finance to save time and capture more revenue.

✅ Hireology: Find and hire reliable staff faster to fill key hotel roles.

✅ Eleanor: Manage your resort’s daily guest service related tasks.

✅ Gcommerce: Audit and improve your hotel’s AI search visibility.

✅ Sertifi: Simplify hotel check-ins and payments with secure digital solutions.

1️⃣ How to Bring AI Into Your Hotel Organization

To keep up with changing guest needs and rising expectations, hotels are adopting AI at scale. Dive into Canary’s research to see how AI is driving revenue growth, operational efficiency, improved guest experiences, and much more.

2️⃣ How to Unlock Better Reviews with AI

A practical framework for evaluating AI-powered review management software and finding the right fit. Explore the tools, trends, and buying criteria shaping the next generation of hotel review management.

3️⃣ How Your Property Can Win on Google Hotel Ads

Learn how to turn Google Hotel Ads into a high-performing direct booking channel. This ebook breaks down how hotel metasearch works, the metrics that matter most, and the strategies hotels use to reduce OTA dependence and grow profitable direct revenue.

⚡️ Hoteliers should avoid the AI hype, integrate useful daily tools

⚙️ Mayfield Hotels’ record growth from AI based pricing and operations automation

🪙 How value is captured across three simultaneously reorganizing AI layers

👩‍💼 Experts break down how hotel tech can stay ahead of guest desires

📺 WSJ: What I hate most about tech in hotel rooms

⚽️ Hotels in World Cup host cities exceed initial RevPAR forecast

📅 Marriott International Research: How Gen Z travelers are shaping the future of luxury

💰 Super.com raises $65M to grow membership program, advance AI

📀 New data on hotel travel spend shows importance of reputation management

✂️ Mews cuts 15% of workforce as AI changes 'economics of hospitality'

FPG helps hotels increase revenue with IN-Gauge, CheckMax, AI-powered performance insights, service-based sales training, real-time goal tracking, and frontline coaching.

👉 Use AI to grow guest spend

The best operators don’t just keep up they stay curious. They demo new tools, test ideas in real workflows, and talk to peers to see what’s actually working. That’s how you find the small changes that compound into meaningful results. Pick your department below and commit to trying at least one new tool this week. Even a single demo can spark an idea that improves performance, saves time, or unlocks new revenue.

What happens when the biggest threat to hotel owners isn't brands, OTAs, or labor costs - but AI?

In this episode, Sloan Dean, former CEO of one of the largest hotel management companies in the United States, shares why he believes the hospitality industry's incentives are fundamentally broken, which hotel technologies actually move the needle, and why many operators may be underestimating the disruptive force of AI.

During his tenure as CEO of Remington Hospitality, Sloan Dean helped grow the company from roughly 80 hotels to more than 150 properties generating over $1.6 billion in annual hotel revenue. With a background in engineering, asset management, and hotel operations, Sloan brings a rare perspective that spans ownership, management, technology, and investment.

👉🏼 Check out our interview with Sloan Dean on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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